Paper

Don’t do magazines

Administrator

Airfix want me to advertise in their digital magazine that you can download to tablets etc, I just wondered how many people prefer digital over paper, it will help me decide if I’m going to take out an advert with them.

SMF Poster

I prefer paper when it comes to proper reading but the availability of digital media is limited - especially magazines, so I only do eBooks.
The benefit is that you can get pretty much all of them regardless of where you live, but it's never going to be the same.

I think placing ads in a digital copy of a magazine is a bad investment because they're going to be viewed a lot less than in a paper magazine - but that's just my opinion based on how I read digital media vs. traditional.

Ok, easy for me to say as someone who's been working with security research for the last 30+ years but still.
If you've got Illustrator or similar software you can import each page as vector graphics and then print them out. Tedious since it's page by page but for a couple of pages it's a quick job.
There are other ways to achieve the same thing but they are a bit more involved, but import to Illustrator is the simplest and easiest method to print a pdf that's locked with DRM.
(often the magazine has been made with Illustrator which can reveal extra bits of information, but that's only if the layout guy/woman has been lazy...)

There just are certain things that can't be replaced like paper and normal TV (2D). Yes it can be useful to have books and magazines in a digital format but there's a reason why the book, magazine and the morning paper looks like they do. They've evolved during many generations. The tablet has only been around for the last 10 years. The same goes for 3D TV. It's a cool gimmick to go to the movies and watch a 3D film, but back home watching the evening news, or a movie, 3D is just annoying.
Manuals/technical documentation/reference material on the other hand is great to have in digital format because you can have a whole library of books in just one device, but that's quite different than reading a magazine or a book if you ask me!

I stopped buying magazines because they became too expensive. We used to have tax on printed media as well so an imported magazine could easily cost £15 or more, and that killed the magazine here.

SMF Poster

Paper every time for me, It's just not the same looking at the screen instead of a proper magazine. I have tried the digital version but not had a particularly good experience with the digital publisher.

SMF Poster

I duly cast my vote for 'paper', but then thought it's not as simple as that. Depending on the cost, if an advert in the digital version of the magazine is 'clickable', it can bring hits directly to the SMS website, whereas an advert in the paper version may just generate a 'must look at that site some day' feeling. So, even if the paper version is read by more folks, and advert in the digital version may be more effective. If you have a way of monitoring whether hits come via the Airfix mag. and it's not too expensive, it might be worth a try.